Snow......A LOT OF SNOW.

We've been having a ton of fun with Odie, the new puppy. He seems like he's a great dog and even sleeps through the night just fine for us. Yay!!!
The kids have continued to be very helpful with Odie and he's definitely brought something special to our home. I mean, look at that face!
We heard there was some snow in the forecast, and sure enough, we got just enough the first day for the kids to miss school. We are very lucky to have a nice sled hill right across the street from us.
Peyton and Malorie getting ready to head across the street for sledding. Can you tell which one my daughter is?

But then, the snow REALLY hit. That night, we got about 9 inches on top of the other stuff and then a few more inches in the morning.


When I got up to take Odie out in the morning, I was seriously at a bit of a loss of how to go about it. I knew we'd need to dig some trails and such, but the dog had to go NOW and it was over a foot of snow!!

Can you see Odie in the picture above? Yep, it's over his head!!!
Odie was certainly grateful when we dug a tunnel system for him through out the backyard.

Once he had a way to get around, he fell in love with the snow.
Mmm....I just love that little fur ball!!

However, the next night, it rained ice and totally covered all our snow in rock hard nasty stuff. It quickly became no longer fun for the kids outside.
Then the power went out.........like in the whole town! Branches were breaking from the heavy snow constantly. It's sounded like 4th of July. The kids had to stop sledding because it was literally dangerous.

We definitely lost some big branches in our yard as well. The tree above to the left of our house was nice and flimsy but it lost half it's height by just bending all the way over.
The power stayed out all day and over night. We woke up to a house that was 53 degrees! Yikes that's cold for inside!
We didn't exactly totally suffer. We played games, sat by the fire, read books, played the piano and of course filled the house with candles in the dark. We enjoyed that part of it very much.
We did have to move everything out to the snow from our fridge though. We heard it might be DAYS before power gets back on.

We were lucky and came back on by lunch the next day, however, tons of our friends are still out of power on DAY 4.

An Act of God:
Sometimes we may wonder how involved God is in our lives. Well, our family had a huge reminder this week.......

The snow was so bad on Wednesday that we had to close the restaurant. Not good for sales and certainly cash flow, and January is kind of a slow time anyway. We were pretty concerned.

However, on Thursday, when most the town went out of power, our little shopping complex was the only area unaffected......for miles. It was like the Lord reached down and protected us. So what had been a loss of a few thousand dollars in sales ended up providing us 3X in sales what we'd normally do in for the week. People stood in our foyer like sardines waiting for a spot to sit. Will and I couldn't stop saying, "We are SO LUCKY" and made sure the kids understood what a blessing this was.

So now the snow is slowly melting (causing some flooding) and life is slowly returning to usual, though they cancelled church today, which is just about unheard of. Our whole family is excited for life to resume it's normal course.